


Je pourrais rester ici pour toujours

by barelyjoyous



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 23:14:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barelyjoyous/pseuds/barelyjoyous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes when they’re in the lab, Tony looks over to see Bruce chewing on the end of a pencil, his face illuminated by the screen in front of him, and he thinks about what he’s too scared to have. </p><p>A character study on Tony Stark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Je pourrais rester ici pour toujours

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [singing with skin and bone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/434994) by [restlesslikeme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme). 



> This has been a long time in the works - I don't even know how many months this has been open on my computer. 
> 
> This is written to be a companion piece to restlesslikeme's Singing with Skin and Bone.

Bruce speaks in stanzas. In broken poetry as he moves through space. His fingers are calloused as he passes them over the back of Tony’s neck. 

His voice comes in waves of whispers and calm and peace as he talks with his hands.

If he closes his eyes tight enough Tony can see those hands on his skin, on his arms, his legs, passing up over his chest until his skin shines with blue light. 

It shines until he pushes his hand down, covers the light with his palm, and when he breathes, breathes and settles his hips down, Tony can feel his heart match the whirr of the machine - can feel Bruce’s fall into sync. 

When Tony breathes in again, Bruce meets his eyes and he’s sitting on the cold concrete floor with a car engine in pieces around his feet. 

“I was seven when it happened,” Bruce’s voice is quiet - the cadence disappearing and crumbling past his teeth. 

Tony looks up, slowly, and watches as Bruce begins to take over his work on the engine. 

There’s a smudge of oil on his left thumb and Tony likes to think that Bruce’s skin is rough from turning the pages of a book. 

Tony wonders what it would taste like if he pulled the finger into his mouth. 

He wonders if his body would accept the oil as willingly as it had accepted the reactor in his chest. 

Seven. 

Tony takes Bruce’s thumb with his hand and carefully sucks the oil off the side. He feels Bruce’s sharp intake of breath and smiles. 

\---

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, Tony thinks of taking the jet, taking the suit, and flying through timelines. Flying past the date line. _I’m here_ , he would think. _I’m here, I made it to tomorrow_. Most of the time he doesn’t, most of the time he has another drink. 

\---

Tony traced his fingers over the crossword pattern creeping up the side of his neck, and thinks ‘ _what do I have left to lose?’_

\---

When he built his first engine, his father had been in the room with him. 

They had fallen into an understanding. If Tony stayed on one side of the workshop, Howard was still free to go about his work. The tinkering had started as a means to occupy himself, a way to make noise and draw attention without seeming like he was drawing it on himself. 

It had ended in a running motor, almost by accident, and Tony remembers taking a step back from what he had built, waiting for the other hand to drop. 

When instead of being punished, his father looked at him with shocked eyes and smiled, Tony knew that he could do better. Knew that he had to do better. 

And he had. 

\----

Tony stands on stage at the Expo and feels his life bleed out through the words he spins. He stands on stage and talks in metaphors, talks about symbols of America, and uncle sam and _never before has an American symbol been more personified_ , and he thinks, have I done it yet, dad? 

He spins the digital blueprints of the expo park between his hands and he feels inferior, _still taking me to school_ he says out loud, and it hits him again, right in the gut, that nobody is there to hear him. 

When he digs through the SHIELD archives of his father, past photographs and notebooks full of information he doesn’t need, his hand pauses on an old copy of a Captain America comic book. He painted a shield on the arm of his first robot. He looked around the empty lab, and sent the specs to his father’s e-mail, halfway across the world on a ship looking for a frozen soldier. He’s too scared to bring it up again.

(Later he will think, I found him, Howard. We found Steve Rogers and you weren’t here to see it. The fact that Tony wasn’t the one to find him seems like even more of a disappointment.)

He listens to his father on the recording, listens to him promise that his greatest creation is Tony himself, and Tony spits on the floor, staring at the projection in front of him. 

(Who else could finish Howard Stark’s work. Who else could rediscover a hidden element. Who else could fight with....)

It hits him in the chest that this is the reason he’s here. 

\----

Tony says no, initially. After he reviews the tapes, the files. After he has his computer hack into SHIELDS files the first time and reads the reports. Tony Stark is many things, but a hero isn’t something that he ever wanted to be. 

The soldier is the reason Tony says no. He is not his father, and he’s not going to spend his life chasing the same dream. When he watches the old newsreels, when he reads the reports, he slaps the file shut between his hands, rolls the data between his fingers, and throws it across the room, the garbage can making a familiar carnival ding when it lands. 

He’s not going to work alongside the man that he lost his childhood over. 

Tony says yes after he reviews Banner’s file. 

\----

“When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” 

Tony turns, incredulously, for half a second before he turns back to the computer screens in front of him. Casually, he opens the main protocol for the ship, throws the levels up and down, and with a few careful slides of hand ups his own security clearance, allows JARVIS to begin hacking into the mainframe. 

“Last night,” Tony answers, holding a hand over one eye and looking between screens. He wonders how people are still working like this, and he yearns for his own laboratory. 

Tony spent an hour catching up on gamma radiation, and another hour wading through anti-electron collisions. The files JARVIS kept open spread through the laboratory, and Tony had gotten dizzy walking between them. One name, over and over. 

He had finished the readings on thermonuclear astrophysics on the plane ride to the base. 

When Tony shook hands with the doctor, he squinted his eyes. Looking for a hint of green, looking for a crumble in the facade. When he doesn’t find one, Tony withdraws his hand and turns back to the research

\----

Sometimes when they’re in the lab, Tony looks over to see Bruce chewing on the end of a pencil, his face illuminated by the screen in front of him, and he thinks about what he’s too scared to have. 

\---

Tony repeats the words over and over in his head until he can feel circuits start to spark. 

(He’s wondered, more than once, if he really was his father’s greatest creation, cut his palm open to make sure he could still bleed, that he wouldn’t find oil and wire, until the scar was raised and gnarled from too many sloppy stitches.)

_Take that away what are you._

And Tony tries to remember to breathe. 

\----

 

When Phil dies, Tony feels it hit right in his gut. He feels something wrench his heart around in his chest and knock it against the arc reactor. What’s worse is that the feeling surprises him. 

Tony’s angry. He’s angry that they brought him here. He’s angry that Coulson died for this. He’s angry about burying a good man for this, and he thinks again _I know men with none of that worth ten of you._

He thinks about Bruce. He thinks about the secret he had almost let slip to Natasha, and he wonders if this is it. He wonders if Bruce always feels like this. 

Tony thinks about Bruce falling from the sky off of the SHIELD base and presses his eyes shut again. 

\----

When he was flying, when he was holding onto the bomb and pointing it into space, Tony had only seen one face in his eyes. 

It wasn’t Pepper, though her picture was blinking through the HUD display.

It wasn’t his father or his mother.

It was his own. 

Tony remembers for half a second seeing his face reflected in the electronic screens and seeing fear. 

JARVIS dropped the unanswered call to Pepper and Tony remembered thinking, 

“Oh,” 

and then he fell. 

He remembered taking in one last gasp before the oxygen filter collapsed, remembers thinking that it makes sense- to die alone. To die alone having everything and being nothing. 

\---

Tony wonders if Bruce felt alone with the barrel of a gun between his teeth, and spits out the jealousy on his tongue that Bruce had the conviction to pull the trigger. 

\---

“Candyland,” Tony promises with a lopsided grin on his face. He thinks about the research in his computer, the numbers that nobody outside of him and JARVIS can understand. 

He thinks about the work he’s done and the blank looks on everybody’s faces when he tries to explain. He thinks about the family he had built for himself in his lab, and he feels empty for half a second, scared like a child when he realizes that he’s in the one car that JARVIS is not linked to yet. 

Tony thinks about Bruce in the lab on the helicarrier, about tossing information back and forth between screens without completing a full sentence. Tony remembers their rhythm, the easy give and take of numbers and equations and theories. He tries not to think of his broken tower, of the empty laboratory within it. 

Bruce presses his eyes shut, slowly, and asks Tony to drop him off at the Port of Authority, and Tony watches him clutch his passport. Fake, Tony can tell just from looking at it, and he wonders what name is printed carefully inside. 

He thinks of the paperwork he’ll forge Director Fury’s signature on, of the phone calls he’ll make to clear Bruce’s name. Tony slips a few thousand dollars into the side of Bruce’s backpack and doesn’t beg him to stay.

He stares off to the side of Bruce’s face when they get out of the car, and he thinks he makes some characteristically witty comment about remembering to write, but the next thing he knows Bruce is pulling him into a hug, and Tony feels his hands grasp _tight tight too tight_ into the front of Bruce’s yellow button down. He listens to Bruce breathe, and he feels a hand come to rest on the metal of his arc reactor. When his heart rate has slowed, when their breathing has synced up, Bruce steps back and turns away.

Tony wants to scream _who are you running from_ but he clenches his hands into his palms and walks back to his empty car and drives home.

\----

 

When Tony wakes up with Bruce sitting on the edge of his bed his first instinct is to run. 

He’s seen before what happens when you complicate a relationship before. He remembers the way Pepper packed her gucci suitcases, folding each dress carefully. Tony remembers sitting on the couch across the room and watching her, watching how each time she creased the side of a dress his heart constricted a little more. 

Each crease said ‘it was only a matter of time, Tony’. 

Each time she put a pair of shoes into the case Tony saw her picture flickering on the HUD display. Every time he tried to think ‘you didn’t answer’, he watched her fingers fold a pair of jeans into her suitcase and he took a drink, instead. 

With Bruce on the edge of his bed Tony feels his heart unclench, thinks ‘you caught me’ and he stays. 

\----

Bruce’s heart beat is steady, calm, constant, under his palm. Tony breathes in and feels Bruce’s ribs expand in tandem. 

His hair is in his eyes, and there’s a twinge in his lower back, but Tony rolls his hips up again and pushes his face into the curve of Bruce’s neck. 

_“I could do this for hours,”_ Bruce had said, sitting so calmly. His legs crossed, one over the other, his hands palm up on his knees. 

Bruce breathes deeply, his eyes barely closed. Each time he takes in another breath Tony feels his own sucked in with it. Each time Bruce breathes out Tony rocks his hips up and arches his back up until he feels his lips press against skin. _“Toujours,”_ Tony whispers, his lips moving over Bruce’s collar bones _“Je pourrais rester ici pour toujours,”._

When Bruce finally chokes out his name, Tony feels himself crumble. He feels his hand move up to Bruce’s face, and when he kisses him through it, Tony tries to pull a little bit of Bruce into himself.


End file.
